IMPLEMENTATION OF H.264/AVC, AVS China Part 7 and Dirac VIDEO CODING STANDARDS Under the guidance of Dr. K R. Rao Electrical Engineering Department The University of Texas at Arlington By Sharan K Chandrashekar ( ) Multimedia Processing (EE 5359) Project Proposal

Introduction A software or a device that enables video compression and decompression is known as a video codec The need for video coding standards arose with the increased commercial interest in video communications Video coding standards H.264/AVC, Dirac and AVS China are the latest standards adopted by ITU-T/ISO-IEC, BBC and China standards organization respectively

H.264/AVC H.264/AVC, an open licensed standard, developed as a result of the collaboration between the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group and the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group It is one of the most efficient video compression technique available today. The generalized block diagrams of the hybrid encoder and decoder for the H.264/AVC codec are shown in Figures 1 and 2.

Figure 1: H.264 encoder block diagram [7]

Figure 2: H.264 decoder block diagram [7]

Dirac Dirac is a video compression system developed by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) utilizing motion compensation and wavelet transforms. Dirac video codec applications span from mobile and internet to Ultra HDTV and film and video production. The Dirac encoder architecture is as shown in Figure 4. The decoder shown in Figure 5 performs the inverse operations.

Figure 3: Original Image (left), Dirac Compressed Image(right) [10]

Figure 4: Dirac encoder block diagram [10]

Figure 5: Dirac decoder block diagram [2]

AVS China Part 7 AVS video codec is developed by the Audio Video Coding Standard Working Group of China. AVS China comprises of four different profiles namely Jizhun, Jiben, Shenzan and Jiaqiang of which the Jiben profile (basic profile) is defined in AVS Part 7 for mobile applications. Key applications Jizhun profile Television broadcasting, HDTV, etc. Jiben profileMobility applications, etc. Shenzhan profileVideo surveillance, etc. Jiaqiang profileMultimedia entertainment, etc. Table 1: Applications of the various profiles of AVS China [5]

Figures 6 and 7 depict the encoding and decoding architectures of the AVS China codec. Figure 6: AVS China encoder block diagram [5]

Figure 7: AVS China decoder block diagram [17]

Project Objective This project will give an overview of the working, performance and hardware requirements of the three codecs. The objective of this project is to analyze the performance of the baseline profiles of the H.264/AVC, Dirac and AVS China Video codecs based on based on various factors like complexity, video quality, bit rates, compression ratio etc. Also using sample videos, factors such as PSNR, MSE and SSIM[20] will be derived for two standard formats.

Abbreviations and Acronyms AVC: Advanced Video Coding AVS: Audio Video Standard CIF: Common Intermediate Format HDTV: High-Definition Television IEC: International Electrotechnical Commission ISO: International Organization for Standardization ITU-T: International Telecommunication Union - Telecommunication Standardization sector MSE: Mean Square Error PSNR: Peak Signal to Noise ratio QCIF: Quarter Common Intermediate Format SMPTE: Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers SSIM: Structural Similarity Metric

References [1] T. Sikora, “Digital Video Coding Standards and Their Role in Video Communications”, Signal Processing for Multimedia, J.S. Byrnes (Ed.), IOS press, pp , [2] K. R. Rao, and D. N. Kim, “Current Video Coding Standards: H.264/AVC, Dirac, AVS China and VC-1,” IEEE 42nd Southeastern symposium on system theory (SSST), March , pp. 1-8, March [3] K. Onthriar, K. K. Loo and Z. Xue, “Performance comparison of emerging Dirac video codec with H.264/AVC,” IEEE Int‟l Conf. on Digital Telecommunications, ICDT 2006, vol. 6, Page: 22, Issue: , Aug [4] X-F Wang, and D-B Zhao, “Performance comparison of AVS and H.264/AVC video coding standards,” J. Comput. Sci. & Technol., vol. 21, No. 3, pp , May [5] L. Yu, S. Chen, and J. Wang, “Overview of AVS video coding standards,” Signal Processing: Image Communication, vol. 24, pp , April [6] L. Fan et al, “Overview of AVS Video Standard”, IEEE International conference on multimedia and expo (ICME), pp , vol.1, June [7] J. Ostermann et al, “Video coding with H.264/AVC: Tools, Performance, and Complexity”, IEEE Circuits and Systems magazine, vol. 4, Issue 1, pp. 7 – 28, Aug [8] D. Marpe, T. Wiegand, and G.J. Sullivan, “The H.264/MPEG4 Advanced Video Coding Standard and its Applications”, IEEE Communications magazine, vol. 44, Issue: 8, pp. 134 – 143, August 2006.

[9] I. E. Richardson, “The H.264 advanced video compression standard”, Wiley Publication, ISBN , 2 nd edition, [10] T. Borer, and T. Davies, “Dirac video compression using open technology,” BBC EBU Technical Review, July [11] T. Borer, “Dirac coding: Tutorial & Implementation,” EBU Networked Media Exchange seminar, EBU, Geneva, June [12] Dirac Specification, Version 2.2.3, Available: [13] BBC Research on Dirac: [14] H.264/AVC Software source reference: [15] Dirac video download source reference: [16] YUV video sequences source: [17] L. Fan, “Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting Standards”, Springer Publication, ISBN , [18] H. Malvar et al, “Low-Complexity transform and quantization in H.264/AVC,” IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, vol. 13, pp. 598–603, July [19] J. Ribas-Corbera et al, “A generalized hypothetical reference decoder for H.264/AVC,” IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, vol. 13, no. 7, pp. 674–687, July [20] Z. Wang, et al, “Image Quality Assessment: From Error Visibility to Structural Similarity”, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol.13, no.4, pp , April [21] A. Ravi, and K.R. Rao, “PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS AND COMPARISON OF THE DIRAC VIDEO CODEC WITH H.264/MPEG-4 PART 10 AVC”, International Journal of Wavelets, Multiresolution and Information Processing (accepted), January Available: ee.uta.edu/Dip/Courses/EE5359/index.htmlhttp://www- ee.uta.edu/Dip/Courses/EE5359/index.html